An online petition from Alberta condemning the new Liberal gun bill is gathering signatures like wildfire on the House of Commons web site.

By provincial population, a breakdown of the petition signature numbers shows opposition to the legislation is strongest in Alberta — which has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in Canada.

Lethbridge MP Rachel Harper sponsored the E-petition in the Commons on March 28, eight days after Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale tabled the legislation, Bill C-71.

Signatures had climbed to nearly 64,000 by noon Friday, after accumulating by a thousand a day earlier in the week.

The petition after only two weeks was halfway to the support received by the most popular E-petition in the Commons since the program began – the 130,000 signatures on an electoral-reform petition sponsored by NDP MP Nathan Cullen last year.

Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, was the source of the highest number of signatures denouncing the gun bill – 15,739, or 29 per cent of the total of 63,904.

Alberta, with just 11.7 per cent of the national population at 4.3 million citizens, accounted for 24.6 per cent of the signatures.

Alberta’s high rate of support for gun ownership was reflected also in RCMP data from the Canadian Firearms Program for 2016. The report showed 290,416 firearms possession and acquisition licences for the province that year – more than each of the other provinces except for Ontario and Quebec.

The RCMP National Firearms Registry for 2016 also revealed a high rate of registrations for restricted and prohibited firearms in the province — with 20 per cent of all registered handguns in Canada and 19 per cent of registrations for restricted and prohibited long guns.

Although the high signature numbers from gun owners or supporters in Ontario might be significant for firearm activists, the province’s population of 14.2 million accounts for 38.7 per cent of Canada’s population of 36.7 million.

British Columbia accounted for 15,739 signatures, or 17.7 per cent of the signatures, while its share of the national population is 13.1 per cent.

Quebec was the source of 6,877 signatures, 10.6 per cent of the total, while its population of 8.4 million accounts for 18.5 per cent of Canada’s population.

Opposition to the bill was also high in Saskatchewan, with 3,579 signatures compared to 2,453 from Manitoba and 2,560 from New Brunswick, which had the highest level of petition support among the Atlantic provinces.

Newfoundland and Labrador accounted for 690 signatures, with 184 signatures from Prince Edward Island. Yukon accounted for 221 signatures, with 144 from Northwest Territories and 37 from Nunavut.

RCMP data suggests most of the duck hunters and farmers the Conservative party wooed during a years-long campaign against the national long-gun registry have not yet signed on to the new fight.

The signature count on the petition is about three per cent of the two million licenced gun owners the RCMP reported for 2016.

The petition claims the legislation “does nothing to tackle firearms violence, but rather adds red-tape on law abiding firearms owners.”

The petition also claims the government is reinstating the long gun registry Stephen Harper’s Conservative government dismantled in 2012 – a complaint based on a clause in the bill that reinstates legal requirements for gun retailers to maintain records of sales.